Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I have been waiting for years for this extraordinary, beautiful film to come out on DVD. The film itself easily rates five stars, or more. But, sadly, not this DVD. The old New Yorker video was woefully inadequate. Unfortunately, New Yorker seems to have done nothing more than transfer the video onto DVD. The ratios are clearly off and the picture quality is very poor. Even the subtitles are ugly. There are no extras worth mentioning (scene selection, if you want to count that.) This is a travesty against one of the greatest cinematic artists of our time. Criterion, are you listening???

Since there are no other available forms, by all means watch the DVD or the video. Just be aware that you are not seeing the work as it was intended by the artist, Theo Angelopoulos--alas, better a poor copy than nothing at all. But hopefully, when Artificial Eye in the UK finally gets around to bringing out their version, they will do more justice to the film.

It is hard to explain why I like this movie so much. I think the best way to describe it is that it speaks to my soul, more than any other movie. The film operates on many levels (see Robert Horton's excellent books on Angelopoulos to explore further) such as Greek mythology, modern Greek history, the issues of borders, innocence and growing up, male role models, etc. However, the real power of the movie, I feel, lies in its ability to transport you to a place where the hidden truths of life, those truths that lie under the surface of our every day existence, are openly displayed and heartbreakingly rendered on screen. I think many independent film fans, especially in the US look for films that are realistic. This film is not realistic in the traditional sense, but it arrives at the core of our existence in a poetic way, and in a way that many people mistake for pretentiousness, false symbolism, and unnecessary artiness. The movie speaks volumes to me, and I hope it does to you too.

There is a superlative scene in Theo Angelopoulos's 1988 film Landscape In The Mist (''''' '''' '''''' or Topio Stin Omichli) that is amongst the best filmic depictions of sexual abuse ever shown, and should be shown as a primer to Hollywood directors on how to be subtle and poetic, especially when dealing with such terminally PC topics. In it, the young ten or twelve year heroine of the film, Voula (Tania Palaiologou), who is on the run, in search of her nonexistent father (whom her never seen onscreen mother has told the children resides in Germany, even though she has no idea who their father/s is/are), with her five or six year old brother Alexandre (Michalis Zeke), has hitched a ride with a nameless truck driver (Vassilis Kolovos). After he tries to dump the kids off at a truck stop diner, but they follow him, he pulls over on the side of a road, as the boy sleeps. He tells her to get out of the truck, and then grabs her into the body of the truck, which is covered with a sheet, or tarp. Manifestly, he wants to sexually abuse her in some way. The camera never pans away from the back of the truck. We hear nothing, and after a minute or two, the young boy pops out of the truck cab and goes in search of his sister, calling her name. He runs out of frame, and a minute or two later the trucker gets out of the back of the truck. Now, the camera zooms in, slowly, to the truck, so that nothing but its back exists in the frame. Then, we see Voula slowly emerge from under the tarp. Her legs, then body. She looks shell-shocked, and her hands are bloodies. Whether this is from her hymen being broken, and feeling herself, or from an injury given to her by the trucker, or scratching him, we are not sure. The blood is not substantial, although likely too much for a broken hymen.Read more ›

If God makes silence, the children must reinvent the world and return it its lost majesty!

Two fulminating and devastating images support the film: in the beginning of the picture the sister tells the story of the Creation to his brother for him to sleep and the other, in the end when the brother after making the awful journey tells the same story to her sister, whom in this case is frightened. The elder sister writes in the letter to his father this eloquent statement: "We don't know We are so tired that we don't know if we go forward or back, so we lose themselves..."

Let's talk the same Angelopoulos: "We live in a culture which has inherited these myths and it's necessary to destroy them, lessen them to the human dimension. It's an arrangement' s count with my natural heritage. I don't accept the fairy tales, the idea of the fate. I introduce the myth in the politic reality and that becomes history in a very different dimension. It's not an interpretation. I confer a dimension at the level of the man, due he is who makes the history, not the myth."

Silence of God, understood as the silence of the own origins. Voula and Alexandros, two brothers who desperately undertake a journey in search of an impossible and unattainable father, conceived as father, memory, origin and history.

Once more, we assist to the main concernments of this superb filmmaker, the return to historical references. Germany is then, a simple reference pattern, it's the trip what it really maters, with all the painful implications, risks and hazardous consequences this fact brings with it. Like exiled angels, they suffer in silence in an indifferent world that does not care the death of a horse in the middle of the night.Read more ›